Testimony

By Rachel Muers

This book brings Quaker thought on theological ethics into constructive dialogue with Christian tradition while engaging with key contemporary ethical debates and with wider questions about the public role of church-communities in a post/secular context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780334054412

Book preview

Prologue

Oceans

I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.

George Fox, Journal for 1647

There’s more than dark enough to drown us all,

pulls with strong currents though it’s overflown.

Mostly, I drift; but sometimes catch the tide

and swept up, thrown between the waves of light

we splutter kingdomwards, make landfall, stumble

bedraggled and squint-eyed, a few steps on.

Introduction

Knowing Experimentally: Approaches to Quaker Testimony and Theology

Beginning with Quaker ethics

This book is about how Quaker theological ethics works, and about what Quakers contribute to theological ethics. I attempt to show how Quaker ways of living and acting – an ethos, a pattern of life – relate to theology, to ways of thinking and reasoning about God and all things in relation to God. In doing so, I also make some more general suggestions about how Quaker theology can be done, and about how theological ethics can be done. The modest hope is that both people who are interested in Quakers and people who are interested in the relationship between theology and ethics will find something worth thinking about, arguing with or developing further.

Most people with a limited knowledge of religious groups know Quakers, if not as people who wear large hats and make porridge oats, then as people who observe various slightly puzzling or unusual rules – like not fighting – along with puzzling or unusual religious practices – like silent worship. People who try to understand Quakers by understanding what they collectively believe are, notoriously, likely to end up more confused than before – confronted by an enormous diversity of expressed belief, diverse not only across time and space but even within the relatively small communities of Quakers in Britain or the USA. It is much easier to find patterns, consistencies and norms in Quaker practice than in Quaker belief – even though the porridge oats bit, for the record and once again, is not true.

So it might seem that ethics is the obvious way to approach Quaker thought. However, people who try to understand Quakers by understanding what they do – how these puzzling or unusual rules, or patterns of practice, fit together and constitute a community’s identity – are equally likely to end up confused. Like Quaker theology, Quaker ethical reasoning is not often systematized. When we look more closely we find that in Quaker communities and in Quaker literature, the basis for a particular course of action is sometimes not explained; or it is explained in a way that does not obviously relate to other explanations; or it is explained in a way that does not obviously refer to God, or to conventional sources of theological authority or patterns of theological reasoning. This is true especially of contemporary ‘liberal’ Quakers in the West, but it is to some extent true elsewhere. As we shall see, from every era of Quakerism there are numerous examples of powerful and prophetic writing, articulating and advocating distinctive Quaker perspectives on the issues of the day; but there are fewer works that articulate any underlying coherence to these ethical positions.¹

In twenty-first-century Britain Quakers are accustomed to being known and for the most part respected – grudgingly, confusedly or otherwise – for their sustained tradition of ethical and political activism. Quaker involvement in the anti-slavery movement, in humanitarianism, in peace work, in post-conflict relief work, and so forth, is often cited. It might be reasonable to think that Quakers often have something distinctive or important to contribute on ethical questions. Quakers themselves either claim or imply this when they devote, proportionally, a large amount of their available collective time and energy – in local, national and international meetings – to producing major statements on contemporary ethical and political questions. Explicit claims such as ‘In the Religious Society of Friends we commit ourselves not to words but to a way’ (Quaker Faith and Practice 1994, hereafter QF&P, p. 17) are common in official and semi-official accounts of Quakerism.

Given that context, it seems to make sense in twenty-first-century Britain to write about Quaker ethics, and expect an audience beyond Quakerism to learn something from it. It is less obvious, however, that that exercise will end up being theological. What if Quaker ethics has nothing theological about it – or nothing that adds to existing work in theological ethics? What, for example, if Quakers are simply being rather more consistent about enacting a set of ethical principles that could be adopted by anyone? Or, what if the historical sources of Quaker ethics lie in some theological moves that are not particularly original or unusual – and have in any case been forgotten by contemporary Quakers? In that case, Quakers might be interesting as the source of several case studies in ethical reasoning, but not as the source of new ideas in theological ethics.

My claim in this book is that Quaker approaches to theological ethics – to the relationship between patterns of acting in the world, and patterns of thinking about God and the world-in-relation-to-God – are, in fact, distinctive and interesting in their own right. I do, however, think that in order to appreciate Quaker approaches to theological ethics, we have to suspend several common assumptions about how ethics works, and hence about what a distinctive contribution to theological ethics might look like. We have to refrain, at least temporarily, from looking for surprising new principles or rules, or even for surprising new interpretations of biblical or traditional texts. Rather, we have to pick up on the idea of ‘not words but a way’, and carry it through to its conclusion at least as far as Quakers do. We have not only to say that the primary form of response to God is in life and action but also to think through the implications of that idea for how both ethical reasoning and theology are done. To some extent, we have to avoid assuming that the ethical life of religious communities is about ‘putting belief into practice’, and consider instead the implications of ‘putting practice into belief’. Early in the book, I set out a framework for thinking about Quaker theological ethics along these lines. Later, I use it to examine some examples of key areas in which Quaker theological ethics might make a distinctive contribution.

As noted above, Quakerism is extremely diverse, not only historically and globally but even (in certain respects) within any given national or local group. My own ecclesial context, and the context on which I focus most of my reflection and from which I take most of my examples, is British Quakerism. British Quakers today – along with Quakers in numerous other parts of the world, although not the global majority – are categorized as ‘liberal’ in the standard taxonomies of world Quakerism.² They can be described as ‘liberal’, because they do not ordinarily use or require either confessions of faith or standardized rules of behaviour or dress, and also because they are the inheritors of the liberal turn in Quaker thought and theology in the late nineteenth century. Their style of worship is categorized as ‘unprogrammed’ – often, somewhat misleadingly, described as silent worship. In this book, I make frequent reference to British and North American examples, but I look back repeatedly to the history of Quakers and in particular to the earliest generations of the movement – to the ‘single theological culture’ (Dandelion 2007, p. 13) to which successive generations have looked to shape their understanding of Quaker identity.

At least some of the terminology I use, particularly in the early stages of the book, will however be unfamiliar or uncomfortable to large numbers of British Quakers today. I seek to relate characteristically Quaker terms and categories to a wider context of Christian theology, in a way that is rather seldom done by or for today’s liberal Quakers. I do this not only because I want to make Quaker theological ethics accessible to a wider Christian audience, but also and more fundamentally because I think theology helps us to make sense of what Quakers do and say. In a tradition deeply suspicious of theology – particularly, the kind of theology done by those ‘bred at Oxford or Cambridge’ – this is a risky venture, but by no means unprecedented.³ We shall see as we go along that I am not short of Quaker theological dialogue partners, either in the past or in the present.

At the heart of my account of Quaker theological ethics is a term that sounds through Quaker history and finds deep resonances in the wider theological tradition: testimony. I begin, then, with an initial orientation to the Quaker idea of testimony.

Characterizing Quaker testimony

And this is our testimony to the whole world. (Fox, Hubberthorn et al. 1660)

When contemporary liberal Quakers speak about the distinctive or core features of Quaker identity – to each other or to non-Quakers – they often talk about testimony. ‘Testimony’ appears among Quakers as a component of individual and collective decision-making, a source of theological and spiritual reflection, and a focus for individual and collective self-examination. It also appears in outward-facing presentations of Quakerism, often as key to understanding what and who Quakers are. Testimony, then, seems to name something that is not merely important, but identity-defining and community-forming for Quakers. Testimony is not necessarily the only, or even the determining, facet of Quaker identity, but it is clearly – for contemporary Quakers – something that cannot be lost without changing Quakerism beyond recognition. (Any Quaker readers, or readers familiar with contemporary Quakerism, who are already irritated by my use of ‘testimony’ in the singular, rather than ‘testimonies’ in the plural, are asked to be patient; I will try to explain this decision later in the chapter.)

It is usually clear, when testimony is mentioned among Quakers, that it relates somehow to ethics.⁴ It relates to ways of acting and ways of life; and the ways of acting and ways of life to which it refers are not limited to defined contexts of worship or ritual. Beyond this, however, it can be hard to understand what Quakers mean by testimony – and what relationship the use of the word, or the reality to which it refers, might bear to its wider context in church and society, or to what other people say about ethics. When Quakers talk about testimony, do they mean general ethical principles to which they adhere? Or specific rules, sets of dos and don’ts? Or visions of what an ideal human life or an ideal human society would look like? And in any of those cases, why should we go on talking about ‘testimony’, other than to perpetuate a piece of quaint theological jargon?

Many Quakers would probably say that these questions, while possibly interesting and possibly even controversial, are not particularly important. The whole point about testimony, they might say, is acting and living in particular ways; arguing about words will not change lives, nor have very much impact on the community’s identity. They would probably prefer – as some of my readers might prefer – to move straight on to the later chapters of this book, which deal with specific ethical, social and political issues and with specific examples from earlier and recent Quaker history. My argument in this Introduction does not directly contradict this response. I want to show, however, that thinking and talking about testimony as Quakers do is a useful and non-obvious way of doing ethics, and that understanding how testimony works could make a difference to ethics. It could make a difference to how we reason and act in relation to specific issues, and also to how we understand others’ reasoning and action.

In order even to start discussing Quaker testimony, however, we need a preliminary definition. Perhaps surprisingly for a term that is so widely used, good and clear definitions – even preliminary ones – are hard to come by. I offer my own here as a starting point for discussion, not expecting it to be particularly controversial.

My initial proposal is that testimony for Quakers consists of patterns of action and behaviour:

that are understood as an individual and collective response to God’s leading and call;

that are shared, intergenerationally sustained, communicated in stories and deliberated collectively, and that develop over time;

that are located in everyday life, rather than (only) in specified liturgical contexts;

and that work in communicative, challenging and transformative relation to a wider context.

In this book, I am not aiming to give a comprehensive history of Quaker uses of the term ‘testimony’, although I do discuss some key shifts in their historical context. Nor am I trying to provide a single definition of testimony that covers all its historical uses.⁵ My account is deliberately constructive within a tradition, as well as descriptive. I aim to provide a theological account of Quaker testimony that attempts to be true to a broad range of historical and contemporary Quaker sources, comprehensible as Christian theology, and internally consistent. I am re-presenting Quaker thought – without claiming to be representative. I hope, incidentally, that my Quaker readers will bear this in mind if I say things with which they disagree; and I very much hope that my non-Quaker readers will bear this in mind before assuming other Quakers will agree with me.

Key features of the Quaker story

In presenting Quaker testimony I cannot tell the full story – either of Quakerism or even of any of its strands. Those looking for comprehensive overviews or detailed studies of Quaker history, thought and theology have many other options available to them, many from within the growing interdisciplinary field of Quaker Studies.⁶ A handbook published in 2013 gives a full and detailed picture of the state of the field – and of the state of research on several key questions touching my discussion here, including specific areas of Quaker social action and witness. The origins of Quakerism in the seventeenth century have been extensively researched and discussed, both through individual figures, texts and incidents and in numerous excellent overviews; most other periods of Quaker history in the North and West have received scarcely less thorough treatment. The relative lack of research into the history and contemporary situation of Quakers in Africa and South America needs urgently to be redressed given the shifting global balance of Quakerism. Unfortunately, it is not one that I am myself competent to fill, and this book is also dominated by examples from the global minority.

Given that there are already plenty of histories of Quakerism, all that is needed here is a few comments about the origins and shape of the Quaker movement, enough to orient readers to key features of the contexts from which my examples are drawn – and in particular to aspects of Quaker history that continue to shape Quakers’ communal self-understanding.

Quakers originated in the aftermath of the English Civil War, in a time of considerable social, religious and political upheaval. The core of the early movement is generally thought to have been groups of ‘Seekers’ in central and northern England. These were Protestants of broadly Puritan sympathies who for whatever reason had no secure ecclesial or spiritual home within the existing church structures – neither, as George Fox later put it, with the ‘priests’ nor with the ‘dissenting people’. In a remarkably rapid process from the early 1650s onwards, these disparate groups became a national movement of worshipping communities and travelling preachers, with distinctive and publicly visible characteristics, a recognizable shared theology (or shared perspective on certain live theological debates), a strong organizational network and, inevit­ably, a range of internal arguments and power struggles.

Quakers were noteworthy for their mode of worship – with the minimum of fixed liturgical form, and involving both extended periods of silence and a range of more or less extreme spon­taneous manifestations of ‘the power of the Lord’ – including, of course, quaking.⁷ They were distinctive in the number and prominence of women among their public preachers and travelling ministers; particularly trenchant in their opposition to ‘steeple houses’, tithes and all signs of established ecclesial privilege; and relatively consistent in various practices that inevitably led to conflict with the authorities, including the refusal to swear oaths and the conspicuous refusal to acknowledge rank or privilege in modes of address.

Opposition to Quakers, official and public, was common from the early decades but shifted dramatically in scale following the restoration of the monarchy. Quakers encountered both the general penalties inflicted on Nonconformists under the series of Acts known as the Clarendon Code, and specific restrictions and penalties under Acts that singled them out as a group. Although there were periods of relative toleration, extended imprisonment and the loss of property and livelihood were common experiences for the first generation of Quakers. Persecution took its toll on the movement at a time when prison conditions were harsh; it is sobering to note how many of the best-known writers and preachers from the beginnings of Quakerism died at relatively young ages in the 1660s.

Neither the rapid rise and development of Quakerism as a movement nor the persecution of Quakers would cover many pages in a history of Britain. Even in the history of Quakerism they account for a relatively short period. However, in terms of Quaker imagination and self-understanding they are extremely significant. I would argue that Quakers carry with them not only the distinctive theological emphases of their seventeenth-century forebears, and not only many of the visibly and socially distinctive practices listed above, but also the experience of being first a gathered community, then a community on the wrong side of the law, and, eventually, a tolerated and ‘peculiar’ people.

It is worth paying some attention to the first of these terms, because it is easy to take for granted. I am suggesting that a formational Quaker experience is of the gathering of seekers, the bringing-together of scattered fragments, the emergence of coherence and community out of spiritual and social chaos. This is what seems to be pointed to by Francis Howgill, in a passage that continues to be widely read and quoted (normally in an abridged form):

[We] were reckoned, in the north part of England, even as the outcasts of Israel, and as men destitute of the great knowledge, which some seemed to enjoy . . . The Lord of heaven and earth we found to be near at hand, and, as we waited upon him in pure silence, our minds out of all things, his dreadful power, and glorious majesty, and heavenly presence appeared in our assemblies, when there was no language, tongue nor speech from any creature; and the Kingdom of Heaven did gather and catch us all, as in a net, and his heavenly power at one time drew many hundreds to land, that we came to know a place to stand in and what to wait in; and the Lord appeared daily to us . . . And thus the Lord, in short, did form us to be a people for his praise in our generation. (Howgill 1672; see QF&P 19.08)

Howgill, like a succession of Quaker writers at the time and since, locates the experience of ‘being gathered’ first and foremost in the practice of waiting upon God in worship – worship based on silence. He extends it, however, beyond the time of worship to characterize the daily life of the worshipping community – referring later to how ‘our hearts were knit unto the Lord and one another’. The experience of being gathered leads to being formed as ‘a people’.

This emphasis on gathering – on the calling to be ‘a people’ and the gift of being ‘a people’, over against appearances and expectations – both connects Quakers to, and makes them distinctive among, groups who espouse a ‘gathered church’ ecclesiology. Talking about a ‘gathered church’ does not necessarily imply or refer back to the situation of having no church at all, of being gathered up from scattered fragments; on its own it mainly emphasizes the particular shared commitment and calling of these people and this community. Quakers do, as I have already suggested, fit comfortably alongside church traditions that stress a common commitment to holiness, and to the shared responsibility and collective authority of the church members ‘gathered’ in obedience to divine guidance.⁸ They add, to this tradition of the ‘gathered’ church, both a historical memory and a mode of worship that take them back, repeatedly, to the experience of being brought – as it were – out of nothing. Community emerges out of disunity. Sense emerges out of non-sense. God speaks and guides people when there is no given and present reason to suppose that this will happen – and every reason to suppose that it will not. Moreover, this experience of ‘being gathered’ out of nothing has visible, historical and social results.

The necessary coda to this account is, of course, that Quakerism does not emerge ‘out of nothing’. It emerges out of the Reformation in the specific forms it took in England, the English Bible, the beginnings of the modern state, the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, Anabaptism, Puritanism, various strands of European mystical and heterodox thought, the specific social and economic histories of various regions of England, and so forth. It is perfectly possible, as many non-Quaker histories have shown, to narrate the origins of Quakerism non-theologically, without accepting or even entertaining any of the claims Quakers made about being gathered by the Holy Spirit.⁹ That is, in itself, not particularly interesting – the same could be said about any history that is ever read or narrated theologically, including the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

What might need more attention, though, is that Quakers’ origins as a community, and the shapes that their worship and life now take, are linked to specific traumas of Christian history. In writing about distinctively Quaker perspectives and practices, I (or anyone else) must on some level recall the schisms, violence and breaches of communion from which Quakerism originates – and treat them as in some sense sources of genuine and continuing gifts, as well as sites of wounds. I must, in other words, be prepared to read the history of Christianity’s divisions and conflicts in and through the Reformation, and in and through the origins of modernity, as something more than just a narrative of decline or failure. But, thinking from the perspective of a community that ended up – in more than one country – on the wrong side of the law, I must do this without losing sight of the suffering involved, and without turning the story of Reformation and modernity into a straightforward story of progress. This is very far from being a developed theory of the relationship between Quakerism and the wider Church – or even the basis for developing such a theory. It is, however, something to bear in mind as we examine Quaker testimony in its wider contexts.

Putting Quaker testimony in context: contemporary theologies of witness

Readers familiar with recent work in ethics, particularly theological ethics, will probably have noticed connections between my initial account of Quaker ‘testimony’ and a set of recent developments in the field. The account I have given here of testimony seems to emphasize communities and their habitual and intergenerationally transmitted practices – rather than, say, the resolution of dilemmas or the application of general rules – as the main locus for theological ethics. In this it resonates with much recent work in the field, particularly though not exclusively in Protestant theological ethics, and particularly though not exclusively